Marianne Heske (b. 1946, Ålesund, NO) is educated at Bergen Kunsthåndverkskole, Ecole Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, Royal College of Art in London and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Heske has been active as an artist for more than 40 years, and has exhibited in museums all over the world. She has been purchased by all the major museums in Norway and a number of foreign ones, including the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1980, Heske created a historic work with "Prosjekt Gjerdeløa" when, as her artistic project for the XI Biennale de Paris, she moved a 350-year-old lair from Tafjord in Sunnmøre to the Center Pompidou in Paris. The Løa was then moved from Paris to Norway again and exhibited at the Henie Onstad Art Centre, before being transported back to Tafjord and set up again in its place of origin exactly one year after its dismantling. Project Gjerdeløa has remained a historical key work in Norwegian art history in general and the history of Norwegian conceptual art in particular. Later, she moved an old wooden house that was passed outside the Stortinget. The project entitled "House of Commons" was done as a contrasting effect to the exalted national assembly and a reminder of the living conditions of ordinary people in Norway just 100 years ago. In Torshovdalen in Oslo, there is a 10-tonne bronze sculpture of a doll's head based on a figure Heske found in 1971 in papier-mâché, at a market in Paris.
Mountain of the mind #3
Digital print
Marianne Heske was groundbreaking when she in the early 1980s portrayed the Norwegian landscape with a video camera that she extracted stills from. She would then digitally modify the images, creating pixellated dream-like simulacrums and then print them in large formats.
Growing up in the north west of Norway, surrounded by titanic mountains over the Norwegian fjords, Heske brought with her a grand respect for nature and its powers. Following the traditions of romantic landscape paintings, Heske's video paintings praise the grandiosity of nature.
The word mind in the works' titles is pointing at Heske's wish for creating a philosophic and intellectual encounter with nature. The series contributed to changing society at the time's expectations of how different mediums could be utilized in art, and contributed to Heske's position as a ground breaking artist within the scene of Norwegian and international conceptual art.
KUNZT, 2020: Videointervju med Marianne Heske
Aftenposten, 03.10.2019: Intervju med Marianne Heske
D2, 27.12.2018: Marianne Heske er flyttemesteren i norsk kunst
Independent UK, 11.02.2016: Intervju med Marianne Heske
D2, 12.11.2015: Herfra til Stortinget
Kunstkritikk, 23.10.2015: Monument for annerledeslandet
Domus, 20.01.2015: tour - Retour
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